Expelled S.Africa envoy to US says back home 'with no regrets'

CAPE TOWN: The South African ambassador who was expelled from the United States in a row with President Donald Trump’s government arrived home on Sunday to a raucous welcome and struck a defiant tone over the decision.

“It was not our choice to come home, but we come home with no regrets,” Ebrahim Rasool told hundreds of supporters in Cape Town after he was ousted from Washington on accusations of being “a race-baiting politician” who hates Trump.

Ties between Washington and Pretoria have slumped since Trump cut financial aid to South Africa over what he alleges is its anti-white land policy, its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and other foreign policy clashes.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week Rasool was expelled after he described Trump’s Make America Great Again movement as a supremacist reaction to diversity in the US.

Rasool, a former anti-apartheid campaigner, defended his remarks on Sunday, saying he was speaking to South African intellectuals, political leaders and others to tell them that the “old way of doing business with the US was not going to work.”

“Unless we change our way of speaking to the US and recognising what is the US — it is not the US of Obama, it is not the US of Clinton — it is a different US and therefore our language must change not only to transactionality but also a language that can penetrate a group that has clearly identified a fringe white community in South Africa as their constituency,” he said.

Trump in February froze US aid to South Africa, citing a law in the country that he alleges allows land to be seized from white farmers.

Trump further heightened tensions this month, saying South Africa’s farmers were welcome to settle in the United States after repeating his accusations — without providing evidence — that the government was “confiscating” land from white people.